Universal Principles of Design, Updated and Expanded Third Edition
by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, Jill Butler
043 Crowd Intelligence
An emergent intelligence arising from the unwitting collaboration of many people.
Crowd intelligence is expressed as an average response to a problem. For a certain class of problems, this average is typically better than any individual response from the group. A crowd is defined as any group of people whose members contribute independently to solving a problem.1
Crowd intelligence works best on simple problems that have clear right and wrong answers. For example, crowd intelligence is effective at solving math problems and answering questions about geography but is less effective at solving problems requiring creativity or innovation. For these kinds of complex problems, the group average gives you mediocrity, not optimality. ...
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